The way I've always heard the punchline, it's "The [i]Nova[i] never sold in South America because people thought the name meant 'doesn't go'." Which is a butt at Chevy, but also at the Spanish-speaking people in question.

That's an easy mistake to make for a native English-speaker. "Ich bin Berliner," "Ich bin Hamburger," "Ich bin Frankfurter" etc mean "I am of Berlin," "I am of ______," i.e. "I am a Berliner," "I am a Hamburgerian," "I am a Frankfurtonian" and so on (I'm kind of making these English versions up as I go along). "Ich bin ein Berliner," "Ich bin ein Hamburger," "Ich bin ein Frankfurter" and so on, the word-for-word translations of "I am a ______er," mean "I am a food item." The English equivalent is the difference between "I am Danish" and "I am a Danish (pastry)."

That's an easy mistake to make for a native English-speaker. "Ich bin Berliner," "Ich bin Hamburger," "Ich bin Frankfurter" etc mean "I am of Berlin," "I am of ______," i.e. "I am a Berliner," "I am a Hamburgerian," "I am a Frankfurtonian" and so on (I'm kind of making these English versions up as I go along). "Ich bin ein Berliner," "Ich bin ein Hamburger," "Ich bin ein Frankfurter" and so on, the word-for-word translations of "I am a ______er," mean "I am a food item." The English equivalent is the difference between "I am Danish" and "I am a Danish (pastry)."

Unless stated otherwise, I do not care whether a statement, by itself, constitutes a persuasive political argument. I care whether it's true.---If this post has math that doesn't work for you, use TeX the World for Firefox or Chrome

I don't. My knowledge that both the Nova thing and the Berliner thing were myths was completely independent of Snopes. (I knew they were myths certainly before I knew about Snopes, and possibly before Snopes even existed.) That just served as an easy concise debunking link to include in my post.

Unless stated otherwise, I do not care whether a statement, by itself, constitutes a persuasive political argument. I care whether it's true.---If this post has math that doesn't work for you, use TeX the World for Firefox or Chrome

Sableagle wrote:Now I wonder what "corsa" actually means, and whether it's related to "hare coursing" in some way.

Italian for 'drive', 'journey'; also the so-and-so-many-eth 'gear' in a transmission. And: yes-ish, I would guess that both this word and the English coursing are connected at least through the Latin currere 'to run' as a common ancestor.

Going with a 2m-diameter object with a density of 114 kg/cu.m, travelling at 14km/s and coming down vertically:

The projectile begins to breakup at an altitude of 102000 meters = 333000 ftThe projectile bursts into a cloud of fragments at an altitude of 76700 meters = 252000 ftThe residual velocity of the projectile fragments after the burst is 13 km/s = 8.05 miles/sThe energy of the airburst is 6.66 x 109 Joules = 0.16 x 10-5 MegaTons.The air blast at this location would not be noticed. (The overpressure is less than 1 Pa)

It's not hitting your car.

Increasing density to 1140 kg/cu.m:

The projectile bursts into a cloud of fragments at an altitude of 56200 meters = 184000 ftThe air blast at this location would not be noticed. (The overpressure is less than 1 Pa)

So if you increase its density 100-fold, making it as dense as ... er ... Technetium, yes it would get down through the atmosphere and obliterate your car. Going for solid gold at 19300 kg/cu.m makes little difference.

Let's try a different kind of "more." Back to 114 kg/cu.m, but let's make it 20m wide rather than 2m wide.

I suspect the impact calculations start to break down before you get to 99.999% of the speed of light - we're not so much talking about an object as a cloud of particles that all happen to be moving in the same direction very, very quickly - they don't have time to separate much in the ~300 microseconds it takes them to reach the ground...

Quite probably. The site does have a disclaimer about the accuracy of their predictions. Obviously, with impacts that happen "every 0.6 days" or something like that often, they have a lot of data and they can be pretty sure of their results, but with an impact of a magnitude that happens "once every 60 million years" or so there are fewer reliably documented observations of such impacts and they're less sure of the results. I was stretching it even further by using such a low density. The densities they offer in the drop-down menu are 1000, 1500, 3000 and 8000 kg/cu.m for water, porous rock, dense rock and iron. NH is only 114.

For that matter, the calculator is meant for realistic velocities:

The minimum impact velocity on Earth is 11 km/s. Typical impact velocities are 17 km/s for asteroids and 51 km/s for comets. The maximum Earth impact velocity for objects orbiting the sun is 72 km/s.

...but that's not realistic. Likewise, 300 km/s isn't realistic. It's possible they're using "K.E. = 0.5 m c^2" because that's close enough for "small" values of v, rather than "K.E. = 0.5 m c^3 / (c - v)" which you have to use for high values.

Yeah, people get so bent out of shape when they see "hopefully" used as a sentence adverb rather than just an adverb of manner.

It's like complaining about, "They clearly painted over the window," on the basis that if they painted over it then nothing is transparent any more.

Unless stated otherwise, I do not care whether a statement, by itself, constitutes a persuasive political argument. I care whether it's true.---If this post has math that doesn't work for you, use TeX the World for Firefox or Chrome

Sableagle wrote:Now I wonder what "corsa" actually means, and whether it's related to "hare coursing" in some way.

It's obviously a description of a parallel encryption algorithm.

"[T]he author has followed the usual practice of contemporary books on graph theory, namely to use words that are similar but not identical to the terms used in other books on graph theory."-- Donald Knuth, The Art of Computer Programming, Vol I, 3rd ed.